Rows of books overwhelm the library NARCY has amassed in his home in Montréal. Texts about philosophy, political theory, history, liberation, and music span multiple decades and continents, fitting for an artist and educator who places a heavy emphasis on education, situational context and awareness.
The multi-hyphenate artist, real name is Yassin Alsalman, made a career out of embodying the spirit of a lifelong learner and a provocateur of the system, questioning authority and the intentions of anyone holding any semblance of power and influence. That mindset comes from a lived experience that has sought to shun his very existence and erase the cultural contributions Iraq laid forth in Arab art.
Since the start of his rap career over twenty years ago, NARCY cemented his legacy not only as the dreamer of Arab unity and collaboration, but also as a leader in rewriting narratives. “Ultimately, positionality is a game of cultural awareness and self-correction.” he says sitting in his home. “I have no interest in hierarchy or being a celebrity.”
In many ways, he has become Arab rap’s Nas, in the sense of NARCY’s looming influence over an entire genre, the respect he garners from his peers for his indestructible penmanship, the timeless nature of his music, and the selective use of his platform to speak on issues that matter most to him. His upcoming album, YASSIN, speaks to this ethos and his determination to maintain that moral compass.
While his willingness to call out injustice may have cost him record deals and music industry support, it has garnered a dedicated collaborative community in artists like Yo-Yo Ma, Ana Tijoux, 40, Hasan Minhaj, Dave Chappelle and yasiin bey.
But to box him in as simply an artist would undermine the work NARCY does as a teacher, both in the academic sense and in a personal way with younger Arab artists. As a professor at Concordia University in Montréal, NARCY led courses on Ye and most recently, Drake, exploring the ethos of each artist and tying their respective works back to larger philosophical and societal questions in the undoing of celebrity culture. Behind the scenes, he has long drawn out conversations with artists during their hardest times.
“I offer to younger artists what I didn’t have. Most of the work is a process of unlearning, keeping things non-transactional and kind. Where most managers or industry pundits will want their artists in the spotlight, I offer them shadow work. We can always do better, together.”
Back in his library, NARCY, beaming with a naturally charismatic smile, maintains the same confidence he had as a 20-something-year-old when he first started.
“I feel freer than I’ve ever felt,” he says. “I feel smarter and sharper. My pen is sharp. I did my 10,000 hours and carved a lane. It’s not a time to hold back or be quiet.”
NARCY has arrived at a point in his career where he can look backward without being trapped by nostalgia and forward without the pressure to prove himself. His work has always been concerned with the question of who gets to control the narrative. Now, he is just as interested in who maintains power over the infrastructure through which culture circulates and what artists owe the communities whose histories they carry.
“I’ve always been a, albeit small, threat to the system. I’m a futurist, and the industries I skirt are driven by men whose cultural awareness is blinded by their exploitation and culture war profiteering. I’m not willing to bow to any form of exploitation of my spirit's work,” he admits with reassured self-awareness.
As hip-hop reckons with its aging idols for the first time in the genre, Arab hip-hop must do the same. Artists who came up in the 2000s like NARCY, Syrian-American rapper Omar Offendum, Palestinian emcees Tamer Nafar and Shadia Mansour, and others, are the artists that influenced an entire generation of Arab millennials. And while there is today an ecosystem of social media and traditional publications covering the Arabic music industry, NARCY and his peers came up in a time where that system simply didn’t exist. If anything, the traditional media system worked to erase Arab artists as the United States invaded Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks.
“There was no representation, so we were our own media,” NARCY explains about his role as a rapper at the time. “This was our role. I needed to educate myself first before I spoke publicly. I feel there is a lack of responsibility both in allyship and within our community now around history. It’s a sign of the internet generation. With the way history has played out; we have to be weary about who we let in.”
Shams Alsalman
That intellectual curiosity remains the throughline in NARCY, both as a rapper and as a human being. The Iraqi artist developed bibliographies for his albums, treating music as a form of inquiry that connects history, philosophy, and hip-hop.
Before the Arab music industry consolidated its power and influence in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Baghdad—along with Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo—served as one of the hubs of culture and art in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet as Iraq faced war and turmoil at the hands of the United States and as obscene amounts of money from Dubai and Riyadh reshaped the power of the artistic industry in the region, Iraq has been left behind. Oftentimes, artists from the country do not receive the same opportunities or financial investment as their peers.
“Being Iraqi is an afterthought for people worldwide,” NARCY shares. “Even within our own community, you don’t see many Iraqis on the stage. If you look at the spectrum of emerging Arab artists, where’s the young Iraqi? And why are they not there?”
The artist explains that this alienation, one deeply rooted in public propaganda about Iraq, comes from “internalized Imperialist behavior” as it relates to his people.
“It's erasure, because the American imperial war machine tried to delete our existence.”
NARCY poignantly adds: “It benefited many Arabs for us to be deleted because we're such an integral part to what an Arab identity is. So in a way, making Iraqis look like people who are at the bottom of the food chain benefited certain countries in our region. The erasure of the Iraqi identity in the East is a direct reflection of American hegemony and its long arm in shaping a Neo-colonial project in our region. They didn't want us to be powerful anymore. And unfortunately, our people internalized that and started behaving that way. America butchered our people and I can never, ever, ever forget that. Israel is butchering our children and I can’t forget that.”
Make no mistake, though. NARCY is quick to clarify that he does not see himself as a savior for Iraq or someone who speaks for all Arabs. “I’m out of place everywhere I go.” But he does acutely understand the space he occupies for listeners and fans who see themselves in him.
“I think I quickly got disillusioned with the record label subsidiaries and media subsidiaries in our region. So I came back to Canada and pushed the envelope as much as I could and I found the same limitations in cultural expansion in the West. I decided real quick, I have to stay independent and do this my way. I wanted to go right into the heart of America and right into hip-hop culture and learn it back to front, gain knowledge of self, learn the history and know my position in it and pierce through as far as I can. This is my position and my purpose.”
His generation of rappers operated before social media transformed music into a continuous performance of visibility. Their work circulated through CDs, music videos, live shows, and the relationships they built with listeners. Political expression was the main reason many of them even got into music in the first place. He came up in an era when Arab identity in Western popular culture was often filtered through the gaze of the War on Terror, and when openly challenging those narratives could carry consequences beyond a bad review or a lost record deal. It threatened your existence.
As NARCY came up in the industry, Arabs were being surveilled, detained, and disappeared—much like today, in many ways. He recalls that creating art was a form of survival. His peers, NARCY explains, operated with different motivations because there was a physical, not digital, threat.
“We didn't have phones and the need to put our image forward to sell our music first and foremost,” he begins. “Our people were literally being raided and blown up on television. When Gaza happened it woke me back up. It hasn’t stopped and we’re ultimately complicit in it, some Arab nations more than others.”
“We weren't TikToking and dancing to our phones, on our social media so people can listen to us. We didn't have that vehicle and mechanism of control around our art. There was no such thing as content-driven art. We were going and launching our albums at conferences where Edward Said and Jack Shaheen and all these master teachers were. It was chapter one.”
He adds: “We were from the generation where it’s like, I don’t even want to be clicked on. Fuck that. Because clicking is part of the problem. I want you to feel something for real, not for reels.”
His skepticism about the attention economy is a natural concern about what happens when the machinery of self-promotion begins to dictate the substance of the art. When artists must continually produce content to maintain their visibility, the incentives can shift away from sustained thought and toward immediate reaction. The pressure to be seen can overwhelm the freedom to think.
NARCY believes that some of the younger artists emerging from the Arab world and diaspora have been caught in that contradiction. He celebrates the growing diversity of creatives working across music, film, and other disciplines, and he recognizes the significance of artists who have found audiences that would have been difficult to reach a generation ago. But he is less convinced by the rapidity and manner in which all of this has manifested itself.
“Consumption by the masses does not mean acceptance or representation.” he says.
For him, the question is what artists and executives do with their newfound access. He is particularly troubled by what he sees as the industry's tendency to sexualize Arab identity at a time when their communities are experiencing extraordinary violence and loss. He argues that cultural visibility should create opportunities for more complex representations, not simply turn identity into a marketable aesthetic.
“I am not a part of ‘habibi city’ or whatever that means. The box is a symptom of a toxic diaspora. We are what we consume, or are we here to be consumed? Celebrating culture doesn’t require commodification. If we were having a revolution, if we were having a renaissance, the revolution shouldn’t be fetishized.”
His demeanor shifts to a more adamant tone.
“The revolution should actually be prioritized. Palestine is as real as it gets, it’s not your marketing campaign hook. We're currently at a place where mass attention is being seen as a win but what we really require is broad attention. We require transformative justice in the arts and industry. We require horizontal growth as a movement, not vertical growth. Attention is one thing but I think we have to start questioning the systems that we function within, and how to build new rules around our cause and our people and our identity. If we keep functioning within this industry and Live Nation stages, celebrity worship and spaces that are run by people who benefit from our deaths, then how are we really changing our reality?”
Particularly over the last three years as genocides in Gaza and Sudan persisted, musicians have had to walk a fine line between authentic advocacy and commercializing the cause.
NARCY believes the artists, largely, are not the main perpetrators of what he says is selling out the culture. “Artists must reflect contradictions because that’s human nature but commodifying a cause is the death of movement. It’s a slow death. There are enough t-shirts going around, we need to think differently.”
Shams Alsalman
“I blame the people behind the artists,” he shares outright. “I blame the execs, the structural flaws, the people in so-called power, the venue owners, the people who should be educated, grown-ass men and women who are just thinking of profit at the end of the day. The war machine and the entertainment industry are mirrors of each other and we have to not fall into that reflection as much as possible. It’s a thin line. Thinner than ever really. It’s time to break away from it.”
After years of balancing touring, teaching, and creative work, he reached a point where the pace had become unsustainable. The years around the pandemic were particularly difficult, battling a cycle of burnout that left him physically and emotionally exhausted.
Together with his wife, Sundus, he established MAKTABA, a bookshop and cultural space in Old Montréal, rooted in celebrating Arab thought and art. The project grew out of a shared interest in books and the lifelong desire to create a more sustainable way to participate in cultural life. It is yet another example of NARCY’s instinct to build outside conventional systems.
“Montréal is a very culturally transient, student-led city. There's so many kids that come here from abroad to study and feel isolated. Canada is also culturally limiting. Though it has accepted many people from across the world, it is still a colonial project. Our awareness of this made us want to build a space that serves black, brown, indigenous people first. If we're going to build a transcultural business that is culture over commerce and isn't a big money-making machine—it isn't a restaurant or a clothing brand—what can we do to benefit the youth? What is a needed intervention? What is the role of the artist in a devastating world? We felt like that might be a necessity for people to feel seen. We wanted to be seen when we were in our 20s, or just be a safer space in the city. It also allowed us both to pace our art and control our means of dissemination. All my music comes out through my bookshop now.”
Ultimately, every move NARCY makes remains firmly rooted in self-correction and education, hellbent on ensuring future generations are armed with knowledge to question the systems and structures that keep certain people in difficult positions.
He wants these tools to be more accessible, in a way that hadn’t been when he was younger.
NARCY still has questions for the world. If his career has demonstrated anything, it is that the refusal to settle for easy answers can itself become a form of artistic longevity.
“I'm just going to say how it is, and if people get offended, then shrug emoji.” he says.
With a cunning smile, he adds: “I'm a Gemini. I have hope, but I also don't. I can celebrate and criticize. I can laugh and cry with you. It depends on the day you catch me.”
'YASSIN' comes out December 4, 2026, via NARCY's label We Are The Medium.
